Exploring Everyday Ethics in Palliative Care in China: A Qualitative Empirical Bioethics Study

How to make an ethical, or morally right, decisions has always been controversial, since everyone has their own moral standards. The provision of palliative care is no exception. In practice, healthcare professionals may encounter conflicts between patients', families' and their moral beliefs of what is best for patients. While this is not uncommon, this experience has not been thoroughly researched yet. In addition, different cultural backgrounds can also result in different conflicts. Currently, most studies focus on the West, and Asian cultures are rather underexplored. Therefore, I plan to investigate how Chinese healthcare professionals experience these conflicts during their practices of palliative care via one-to-one interviews. I will gain empirical knowledge about what these challenges are, if they have been trained to deal with it, and how effective these trainings are. Based on these results, I also expect to make insightful suggestions on its improvement.